For God and Country
Interesting article from Sunday Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2155558.html
Seems they went around interviewing the City Circle crowd. Some of it is good, some bad. I particularly like the bit about the Muslim scout group in Birmingham.
"Downstairs, in two or more draughty, dusty rooms, the scouts are separated by gender. The boys, Omar, Abu Bakr, Haaris and others, are rehearsing a play they will be staging to raise money for a Palestinian scout troop. Haaris is playing an angel sent by Allah to help three suffering men; he returns to see if they have cherished or abused his gifts. The tale turns on mercy and retribution, praise or bitter chastisement, the dichotomies of rigorous faith that are a mere memory in secular society. They may pledge their allegiance to Allah and “the country in which I am now living”, but watching them transports you to a more innocent era: they are like children rather than mini-me consumers; cheeky but not rude, biddable; when a leader tells them, quite severely, to pay attention to the play and only laugh at the funny bits, they do just that. Who teaches British kids of their class how to behave in a theatre?"
posted by Abu Abdullah @ 11:15 p.m.
3 comments
3 Comments:
...In December, year seven were busy making Christmas cards. At first they had been resistant to the idea (what did Jingle Bells have to do with them?), but their teacher, Nasima, a sophisticated PhD in microbiology, asked them to think about it from a Muslim perspective. “I had to get that staunch, ingrained thinking out of them. This is a good impressionable age to open their minds to tolerance towards other faiths. They drew Mary giving birth by a river in September with mountains and fig trees in the background.”...
Not quite sure what's going on here, Mary giving birth pictures?
That was an interesting but equally worrying read for many reasons...
Interesting criticism of the article by the head of the saturday school in mchc:
Dear Editor,
I read with interest Lesley White's article "For God and country?" dated 7th of May 2006.
Ms White's article, for all its impressive length and purported scope, seems to have omitted or downplayed the positive nature of some of the work she has reported on. Despite the range of events and projects she looked at, one gets the definite sense that not a single one of them passed muster – a pretty poor show for the Muslim community indeed.
But wait. Let's take the example of the Saturday School in West London, the "apogee of well-intentioned ethnocentricity", where I have taught for about 5 years. The fear that this school represents a community looking after its own interests ahead of those of wider society has possibly obscured the fact that it can be precisely these types of initiatives which seek to build bridges and bring a particular group up to speed with the mainstream. Why else would year 7 children be drawing Christmas cards? And why else would the children speaking "broken English in thick Asian accents", be attending English classes? It's interesting how the assertion about Muslim children not feeling part of British society is illustrated with the example of a class of 4 pupils learning English as a second language, when there were over 150 more children, mostly British born and raised, to choose from. Incidentally, that particular class of children were Arab, so logically their thick accents would also be Arab, not Asian. A small distinction perhaps, and whether it's indicative of deeper rooted ethnocentric bias or not, I don't know. Although the article recognised the underachievement of Muslim children in education, it felt like Ms. White then begrudged them the opportunity to improve their situation.
Returning to the main article, I find it depressing that any initiative by the Muslim community which falls short of complete "assimilation" (as if the British have ever been a single homogenous mass) will be met with scepticism at best. Suspicion of the Muslim community permeates the article; this is a community which considers itself "answerable to a higher power". But this overlooks the fact that there are many people, of all faiths and none, whose consciences would override their sense of national self interest, especially in regards to foreign policy. One only has to look at Pax Christi or the International Solidarity Movement for examples.
I also wonder at Ms. White's use of statistics in her summary: her assertion that an ICM poll from July last year showed 30,000 Muslims sympathising with the July 7th bombers is deeply misleading, and all the more so for be used as a crux of the article. The poll interviewed 500 Muslims, of which the overwhelming majority stated that using violence to further a religious or political end was unacceptable. To get a more balanced view, I would encourage other readers to look at the results of the poll themselves. The idea that Muslims constitute a sinister fifth column within British society can be argued with varying shades of subtlety, but this misrepresentation was particularly irresponsible.
The Muslim community has a lot of work on its hands, to show the value it can add to wider society. It needs to be more open and more self critical, agreed. But it doesn't necessarily need to give up being Muslim to do so, although that is what it seems Ms. White is asking it to do.
Best regards,
A Rahman
Saturday School teacher at the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre
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